DERIK SAVAGE

Founder & CEO

Derik is a leader who does two things better than anyone… connecting and solving problems. It’s human nature to want to belong to something, Derik cuts to the heart of the matter by connecting people to what they want to see and where they want to be. By combining these abilities, Derik has created a recipe for success when it comes to ambitious companies that want to grow.

While working in sales for over 20 years, Derik always had his music on the side. He loved the way it felt to connect with an audience when performing live. Wondering if he could bring that feeling to a larger audience, he bought a video camera and started recording live shows. Little did he know that one day would change the rest of his life. His talent for connecting resinated quickly in the music community. And soon after, LiveNation and other outlets came calling and asked him to film such bands as Van Halen, Kelly Clarkson, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Maroon 5, and Jane’s Addiction, just to name a few. 

With his newfound ability to use video as a medium to create connections, he began to think about how he could translate that into his day-to-day corporate life as a salesperson. After spending too much wasted time cold calling, he knew he could streamline the sales process if there was already a connection made between company and prospect. With that thought, Savage Media was born.

Derik wanted to create the sales tools he never had. A good salesperson knows every sale is a race to trust. Having content that speaks to the “pain” a customer is experiencing greatly increases the chance that they will trust what your company has to offer. Derik knew he had the ability to create the type of content that could speak to the pain and gain trust, which would in turn reduce the time it took to close a deal. This effectively would turn cold leads into warm leads and generate more revenue in the end.

A lot of problems can come up when trying to connect an audience with a company. Luckily, Derik is a high-level problem solver. Whether it’s building a 10G server from scratch to creating tailored integrations that can optimize sales operations, he can always figure it out. 

A short time after launching Savage Media and creating amazing content that connected with the clients' target market, he saw a breakdown in how the content was being implemented online and how the leads that were coming in were being worked. This was a huge problem.

Derik saw this problem and turned it into an opportunity.  First, he hired a social media manager at Savage Media to manage all the content implementation for clients. Next, he aligned sales with marketing so every lead would be maximized. He did this with an elegant solution called the inbound methodology.